In the United States, the term is associated with Asian Americans, primarily Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and to a lesser extent, Vietnamese and Filipino Americans.

A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. Statistics are often cited to back up their model minority status such as high educational achievement, overrepresentation at Ivy League and other prestigious universities, and a high percentage of Asian Americans working in white collar professions (jobs such as medicine, investment banking, management consulting, finance, and law).

While some Asian Americans hold pride in the model minority image, the consensus in academia and the field of Asian American studies is that the Model Minority Myth is detrimental to the Asian Pacific American (APA) community, used to justify the exclusion of needy APA communities in the distribution of assistance programs, public and private, and understate or slight the achievements of APA individuals. Communities that are especially affected are South East Asian communities, e.g. Cambodian-American, and the Pacific Islander community, e.g. persons with origins in Guam and Micronesia; these communities have much lower education rates and higher poverty rates. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Indian Americans are over twice as likely to graduate with a bachelor's degree than most members of other Asian-American groups. The Model Minority myth relies on the aggregation of success indicators, hiding the plight of recent first-generation immigrants under the high success rate of more established Asian communities.